Open Ag Toolkit

Precision Farm Management.

We want to make it easier to manage farms by improving the way farmers
are able to collect and use information. So, we're writing some
simple, free, open-source mobile apps that sync across everyone on a farm through existing cloud services
like Trello and Dropbox.

Farmers

Developers

Overview

There are many precision agriculture tools out there for measuring agriculture: yield, locations,
seed population, etc. What is missing is the ability to manage agriculture: track planting
progress, plan fall tillage, decide which fields to spray first, etc. Many existing
management platforms require a farm to adapt their farm to software, rather than enabling
them to use software that adapts to their farm.

Apps that Work

Spend time farming, not reading user manuals and typing away endlessly on that little phone
keyboard. We design our apps from the farmer's perspective, minimizing the number of screens, clicks,
swipes, and confusing messages that you have to deal with. Open the app, do what you need, then
go right back to some real work.

Apps that Work Together

Each app is designed to work just fine by itself for a specific job. Use only the apps that help
you, leave out the ones that might complicate things. The apps you decide to use will work
together by sharing information among themselves where sharing makes sense.

Apps that Work with Everyone

If everyone on your farm has the same information when they need it, it is more likely to be correct and
useful. Each of our apps synchronize everything securely between all the devices on a farm,
so everyone has the same list of fields that need to be chiseled, the same list of fields to plant,
etc.

Apps that Work Forever

It's hard to look at the past ten years of information for a field if your record keeping software
company went out of business two years ago. We take a different approach: we store information in ways
that you can use without the need for our apps. Planting dates are in spreadsheets, rocks to pick up
are in a simple list on Trello. This way you truly own your data.

Apps that Work Securely

No one but you should have access to your information. We store things in any cloud service that
you already trust: Google Drive, Dropbox, Trello, etc. Each app can use any one of the existing
cloud services that you may already use. Your information as private as the best cloud security
can provide.

Look through the current apps to see if any might work for your farm. We're
adding more all the time.

Developers

Each app has its own development resources: functional specs, UI mockups, documentation, and code.
Click on any app above to access its information.

Process and Design

Our development process starts with functional specifications. If you don't know what those are,
here's Joel Spolsky to explain it.

Identify the types of users who will use the app (limit it to about 3 or so), give them names, and then
provide user stories about how they might use the app in daily life. Then add in user interface mockups
(Balsamiq works great) showing all the main screens a user will see.
Here are some of our mockups for Tillage App and
Rock App.

There are also shared libraries available on GitHub
to ease the process of adapting your app to any particular
cloud storage. When adapting an app to synchronize via the cloud, be sure to design the backend storage format
to be human-readable outside your app if possible. Since users are welcome to manually change any
backend data, be sure to make any parsers or data loaders as tolerant as possible.

Ideas for Apps

If you've got an idea for an app, a great place to start is by writing up a functional spec on
Google Docs to tell us how you think the app might work and who you
have in mind to use it. Send a link for it to the
mailing list to get some feedback and
convince the community to get it on the roadmap.

Progress

July 17, 2013

We're going live! We're all Android for now, but We've got our first three apps: Rock App,
Tillage App, and Trello App.
We also have a shared Trello library that handles synchronizing data between generic apps and Trello.
There are many, many more things to do including:

More apps: we have more planned apps than people to develop them.

More platforms: we're only on Android now. iOS will come as soon as we get some people to work on it.

More cloud storage libraries: we've only got Trello support now. Dropbox's new
Datastore API has caught our eye and moved them up
the list ahead of Google Drive.

More support and community: to give this project long-term stamina, we're actively seeking partners
and community developers who would like to contribute.

Support

We are actively seeking contributors for this project and ISOBlue, so
if you like either the concept or any of our apps, please contact us
for more information.

A special thanks for all our support this far:

USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture through the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative